The core attitudes and tracks of course need work. At its base, D&D is still a game about breaking into peoples' homes, stabbing them in the face, and taking their stuff home in a santa sack. And so it is that the social system needs to conform itself to a world where people are doing that shit. Which means that there is frankly a lot of stuff that we don't really care if the game handles well, and some very specific stuff that we care a lot about.
So here's my short list on "stuff" you have to be able to do in D&D speaking roles:
- Negotiate a Surrender.
- Haggle over the price of an item.
- Talk an angry monster into not fighting.
- Convince a group of peasants to take up arms.
- Assume leadership of a group.
- Interrogate a prisoner.
- Turn a group against another person or group.
- Gather information from random dudes in a bar.
Fundamentally thus, there are four things you need to be able to do:
- Improve/Poison [target]'s feelings for you.
- Improve/Poison [target]'s feelings for another.
- Negotiate Agreements/Trades.
- Information get.
The system has to be able to handle those four things. Where the basic D&D system fails us is point #2. You can pretty much do getting people to like/fear you and haggle over shit with diplomacy, intimidate, and bluff, and you ca get information with intimidate, gather information, and sense motive. Those systems are clunky and simplistic, but they work at all. Unfortunately, the game has no mechanics whatsoever to handle spreading lies about how the king is a syphilitic incompetent or to convince the orcs that the drow have disproportionate treasure to their strength and deserve a raid.
Frankly, I don't give two shits about whether there are rules to get people to be "confused" or some crap, because that's completely unnecessary. The game really
must cover those four things, and anything else it covers or doesn't cover is either a bonus or a confusing piece of chaff depending upon presentation.
-Username17